Jamie Rogers’ wish list contains a few unexpected items including a power hammer and a coal forge. But then again, Jamie Rogers is an unexpected woman. Small in stature, she is anything but diminutive in how she approaches life. She is a blacksmith, a silversmith, a painter, a glass artist, a knife thrower and a fire dancer, and that’s not the half of it.
A full exhibition of her artistic endeavours will be on display (and for sale) at the Vineyard Artisans Festival, the longtime summer market at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury that features Island artists and their work. The festival began in 1995 as a place for craftspeople to sell their pieces directly to consumers. Ms. Rogers has been involved from the beginning as it was her mother, Andrea Rogers, who started the festival.
While Ms. Rogers, 36, has a life-long connection to the festival, she also has a life-long connection to creating.
“I feel like it’s in my blood,” she said.
Her family is a creative one and she has long had the drive to live a self-sufficient lifestyle. Sitting in her Oak Bluffs backyard surrounded by organic gardens, Ms. Rogers remembered how her father could build anything, from the family home to cars to boats and airplanes.
Her mother also encouraged her artistically, teaching her how to make soaps, candles and paper. Not only did she create a space for all Island artists to congregate, she also carved out space in the family home for family members to have their own studios. Jamie Rogers has three.
Tucked away in the back corner of a cluttered garage, Ms. Rogers works on crystals that she wraps in wire, hammers out silver for delicate jewelry, turns colorful panes of glass into sunflowers and sun catchers, and repurposes vintage tin into eclectic handbags. Next to a huge domed window in a spare bedroom, Ms. Rogers has her painting studio.
Painting is her most recent venture, a break from the more physically arduous work of blacksmithing — she has tendonitis in both her arms. Using acrylics, she paints spiraling pointillist mandalas.
Outside in an unassuming shed with a bird’s nest over the door is her smithy.
“It’s amazing what you can do with iron, you don’t realize,” she said. “When it’s 2,000 degrees, you can mash it and bend it and twist it and make it do all sorts of things. But it’s steel. Five seconds later it’s rock hard.”
At the moment Ms. Rogers is working on a commissioned pair of lawn mower handles.
Ms. Rogers discovered blacksmithing while at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. After having a difficult time in high school on the Vineyard, Ms. Rogers left the Island for Colorado, where she rock climbed and searched for crystals. Seeing people wearing wire wrapped crystal pendants she decided to try making her own jewelry. But her time in Colorado was cut short when her father died in 2005, and she moved back to the Vineyard to be with her family. During that period she went to the Penland School for silversmithing and took a two-month concentration in blacksmithing.
“I was so burnt and blistered and dirty,” she remembered. “But I loved it.”
Back on the Island, Ms. Rogers decided she needed a smithy to continue working. After protracted discussions with the town and concerned neighbors, she was granted permission to build her smithy in 2007.
“I love forging when it’s snowing out,” she said. “I mean there is just something so nice about it, you’re in there sweating in a tank top by your fire and creating things you don’t even think could work, out of something so hard to make it mushy and bend the way you want it to. Just that heat.”
Though Ms. Rogers usually works alone, last year she was the blacksmith on the reality television show Big Giant Swords that featured Vineyarder Michael Craughwell.
“It was really fun to work with a nice big group and make stuff together,” she said. “That was more of a sense of community.”
For each craft there is a different skill set. Stained glass is like a puzzle and painting means focusing on color, but most of her crafts involve hammers.
“A silversmith uses their wrist, a carpenter uses their elbow and a blacksmith swings with their shoulder,” she said, demonstrating each swing.
Winter months are for intense artistic work, while summers involve creating and selling. But her hammers are very rarely resting. In addition to keeping her stock full this summer, Ms. Rogers is building a tiny home on wheels with her fiance. Eventually, she hopes to open an art school in North Carolina and live off the grid, toting the home along where ever she goes. She is also keen to learn new skills — mosaics or maybe basket weaving. And she’s always wanted to make knives.
While there won’t be mosaics, baskets or knives in her stall at the artisans festival this summer, there will be everything else.
“I work on whatever I need to,” she said. “If I sold a lot of stained glass that day, well, I need to go home and do stained glass. If I sold a lot of paintings, I need to go home and paint.”
The Vineyard Artisans Festivals are every Sunday at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury through Sept. 25 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday festivals begin in July and end on August 25. Visit vineyardartisans.com.
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